What the buffoons in any audience didn’t know was that the position of the head dictates the position of the rest of the body. Toshy could stretch one leg up the chain like a New York Rockette. She could attach her ankle to the links with her hand. Her other arm would do an over-head until she sank down to the floor and performed as if she were boneless. The Dirty Neva dance would be nothing compared to the number she was conjuring up now. And once she got back on stage at home, he would have the best seat—looming over her from grey skies, observing the exotic with Julian Asti intensity.
The men in uniforms were still out on the sidewalk with Amy. The strip of houses led down to a donut shop and a car place. Her apartment was poor too, but at least there she lived under the spell of the Alexandrinsky Theatre. She remembered walking to her apartment with Julian during his visit and how he said he felt the thumps from the orchestra in his chest. Now she realized it was just his affection because she hadn’t felt anything in her heart that night.
Fixing her hair with a splash of water, Toshy was busy envisioning the Alexandrinsky dancers with their caps of soft black feathers tight on their heads, telling a violent story with their limbs. The mood of the ballet would rise from the Theatre’s chimneys and fall on her like a sticky layer of dust.
Choreography was personal. Packing up to leave she became excited for the long flight where she would have hours to discover the soul of her composition. She loved looking over the wings of the plane, with the endless depth of the Arctic below, then finally to the Norwegian Sea, the energy of the waters shooting through her legs. No one could reach her in the air of her imagination. She wondered what name the men would give her this time. Flamingo? Loon? Little Sandpiper? Julian was right. The mind could never stop thinking.
SOUNDS SKIMMING OVER THE ATLANTIC
Max took out his gigantic linen handkerchief and used it to remove a pepper from his breast pocket. He cracked open the red skin with the tip of his steak knife and sprinkled the seeds over his spaghetti. As he tossed, he explained to me in a secretive voice that touching the skin for even a second could burn your fingers. He wrapped the skin in the napkin so none of it was exposed and placed it in the ashtray.
The tables were dressed in checkered tablecloths, and Ruffino bottles substituted as candleholders.
“I haven’t been in a place like this since I was a little girl,” I said.
“Kath, you’re still a little girl.”
I was starting to miss my friends. Top Cat’s taking over, they said of Max. They had a name for everybody and had started right in the day I met Max in the Prego Prego near NYU on Tenth, as we huddled over mozzarella sticks and a pitcher of beer. He had the kind of looks you’d find in an Italian movie with subtitles—dark messy hair in a ponytail half-in, half out of his shirt collar; blue, blue eyes; and a body so taut, it appeared as if a flesh-colored fabric had been stretched and fitted over his small frame.
Max owned a string of Prego Prego’s, so when we had the chance, we tried different kinds of Italian. There, at Carmella’s, they tossed the pasta in a sauté pan right at your table.
He held up the garlic knots, tempting me.
“Max, I’ll reek later.”
“I’ll suffer,” he said.
Afterwards, in the car, between the heavy red wine and garlic, I was the one suffering. On the way to the party, I felt like I had to vomit as we drove down Montauk Highway. We had the top down, and I pressed my head on the back of the seat to keep it in place. Stars that should have been still and bright in the black Montauk sky were darting around as though they were looking for a better spot to hang, bumping others out of the way. I focused on the streamers they left behind like disintegrating tails. The shooting stars, along with the smell of salt and fish from the Atlantic, made me more dizzy and nauseous. I took an Izod shirt from under the seat and held it over my mouth.
Max pulled the car over, expertly hiding it in the brush and reeds at the entrance to a hidden driveway. He helped me out and stood behind me for support. With one hand on my stomach, the other hand on my forehead, he let me barf. He wanted me to. “There you go baby, come on…let it come up, don’t fight it…come on…that’s it…you’ll feel like a million bucks again.”
It was hard for me to imagine that a man like this, a man who took such care of me, hardly knew the affection of a mother. He had been so young when she died, he said his memories of her came to him very seldom.
“Tell me, about her. Please.”
Max dampened his handkerchief with a fresh bottle of Evian and patted my face, the back of my neck. He looked as if he hadn’t heard me, but I knew he was pretending.
As we drove to the party I didn’t have the strength to speak. I watched Max and tried to picture him as a baby, alone in a big-wheeled carriage with no mother behind him. All I could see was the same forty-six-year-old jaw, with just the right amount of stubble I loved, jutting out of a lacy bonnet—an olive-skinned baby-man with a large bow tied under his chin.
Unlike Max, who had so little to hold on to, I could remember my own mother and had told Max, countless times, how she had been photographed again and again. One of our last moments together: I stood in the doorway and I could hear the thighs of the nurses, hissing, their heavy legs coated in thick nylon, rubbing together as they sashayed around the room, helping themselves to chocolates my mother would never eat again. They hoisted Mom up by her limp shoulders, making her chest a clear shot for the X-ray machine. And now I heard their sugary voices perfectly: Lovely, you look so lovely today, Didi. We’ve come to take your picture. Did your daughter fix you up like that?
I wasn’t a talker and had stepped outside the door, standing in the hallway with a tube of lipstick and a comb in my pocket. I knew how much Mom did not want to be there, and I thought about how often I had stood in the hallway on the sixth floor at Sloan-Kettering, staring down at the waxy tiles, thinking I could see Mom’s face in the reflection, looking up, begging me to get her out.
I have thought of this every day since she died. I’m not sure why. I was only fourteen then. Max and I knew this motherless thing like no one else. And he never tired of my memory. I described it to him over and over again, and, in each version, I focused on something different—the way I applied Mom’s Misty Mauve lipstick and blush, or the little tail on the comb that I used to make a French twist before they took the X-ray, even though she was in a coma.
I still carry one of those teasing combs and love making Max sit between my legs, my boobs against his back, fooling with his pony tail, or making a bun—guy types, of course. I tease him until he is absolutely dying. For me. In our sleepy moments, I tell him more stories, without demonstrations. He pulls my legs closer to him—they’re longer than his, the top of my thighs (almost) reach his waist—and listens. Listens and measures.
By the time we reached the party on Dune Road I felt better, and Max was doing his thing to me. Talking to me with his car. He used his car as if it were his own body—slowly backing it up, moving forward, revving the engine, slightly going back and forth, first a little then a lot. But now he was saying something else. He was going so slowly into the driveway of my friends’ rental, he didn’t kick up any gravel, not one pebble. We rolled like miniature people in a child’s play mobile, showing me he was uninterested in the whole party thing. Extravagant blue lighting, with rhythm, flashed over the roof, a perfect imitation of fireworks. Drew Richards, who wanted to be a lighting man, was up on a ladder at the side of the house. He was in the film department. I was in NYU’s graduate program for Early Childhood Learning. Everyone else was getting their MBA’s. You could always find Drew up on a ladder, with wires round his neck like so many Hawaiian leis and a beer bottle in his back pocket, although he never took time out from his projects for a sip.
Max bypassed him as if he were a bird on a tree.
The house looked even saltier than last year’s, with rotted buo
ys hanging off the gutters, the kind of place you couldn’t damage, even if you tried. Every Fourth we ended up clearing one bedroom of beer cans, and all of us sacked out together.
Max pulled me around to the other side of the house, to a path that led down to the beach. He had his hand on my back, steering me.
“Just for a minute,” I said, knowing Robin must be worried we were going to do a ‘no show’ again.
He pointed to a rusted anchor jutting out of the sand. “Watch out.”
The back deck was high off the beach, loaded and sagging, and I wondered if it might collapse with everyone on it. I tried to scope out my friends, but I was quickly maneuvered toward the shoreline.
Max walked backwards facing me. “I’ll never buy here—I’m trying to get away from New Yorkers.”
“Who cares.” I loved Max’s sparse apartment, so close to the Central Park Zoo that we could look down and see the polar bears sloshing around in the phony Arctic.
“Shall we?” He offered me his hand.
We could see the rental from the beach, glowing on stilts, propped up like an old ship on the sand, but far enough away for us to be completely alone. I felt like I was spying on my own friends.
I sat down close to the water and Max lay down next to me, leaning on one elbow. Most of his hair had fallen out of his ponytail. He put his foot on top of mine and scraped off the wet sand—“Breaded flounder-foot, ready for the fryer.”
I was thinking of sharks tooling around out there, and how there is nothing beautiful about the ocean at night.
“Come on, lie back.” He unzipped my pants discreetly, even though no one was around, and pulled up my t-shirt just a bit. “Here?”
“No, down further.”
“Here?”
“No, down further and to the right.”
He kissed my stomach, near the hipbone. “Here.”
“Yes.” I put my hand over his mouth: “That’s exactly where I gave her the shots.”
“Nurse Kathy.”
“Oh Max, you know the raw pizza dough that sits in the silver bowls in Prego? That’s exactly what her skin was like. I had to squeeze a roll of it.” I tried to pull my skin from my stomach to demonstrate, but it didn’t even come close. “So she’d feel a blunt jab. Not a sharp one.”
“At night?” Max asked, but he already knew the answer.
“Two shots in the morning and two at night. Do you believe that? We used to say, ‘Just our luck.’”
“Tough old broad.”
“She wasn’t a broad, Max, she wasn’t even old.”
“Sorry. You knew how to do the syringe? At that age?”
“They were pre-measured injections—it was like taking a straw out of its paper wrapper. Looked like yellow perfume.”
“How long did that go on?”
“About six months. Until she went back into the hospital.”
“And, where was your dad?”
“Working, mostly.”
We must have gone through the story twenty times before, but now I added the perfume part. The gold liquid. Max slipped his hand inside my jeans.
“I think I know what it’s like to have a baby, Max. I mean—I know what it’s like to take care of one.”
“Me, too.”
I could faintly hear Handel’s Water Music now rousing me out of a gooey, familiar place. Every Fourth, I was tricked into thinking these soft horns and pipes were natural sounds skimming over the ocean toward us on the deck of our annual rental—but Drew piped it in for his lighting show. It all worked together with the fireworks that were shot off by a private club further up the beach, where the nice houses began.
I got to my feet, zipping and brushing myself off, and started back toward the house. Max came up behind me, the bottoms of his white pants rolled up. I reached for a comb in his back pocket and was surprised to find Mom’s old comb with the pointy tip.
“Leave your hair the way it is,” he said, stepping away from me.
“I want to go in through the front,” I said. “It would be like we just arrived.”
We were silent, walking through the sand, as if we were carrying something heavy between us. The spray off the water hit my face in sharp pings. We snuck between two other houses to get to the front so that we wouldn’t be seen from the deck.
In the humid living room, bodies moved as if floating through a thick solution. When Robin kissed me on the cheek I felt her damp face. She shook Max’s hand, flashing her diamond.
“The bathroom floor is soggy,” she said. “Hope you don’t have to go.” She glanced at Max’s leather sandals. I noticed a drop of vomit on one of them.
Robin began digging Max for info. She started in with possible entrees for her wedding, and as I left to search for the others, she was already onto, “So, Max, were your parents in the restaurant business?”
Eddie had worn his sneakers heels out, so the backs of his shoes were mashed down. “Top Cat let you out?” he said, yanking on the belt that hung off my waist. A new purple-headed girlfriend in a tube top was at his side. Robin’s fiancé was there, too, already acting like a husband, avoiding Robin.
“He’s right over there and coming this way,” the girlfriend added.
“Of course he is,” Eddie said, putting his finger through the loop of my earring pretending it weighed a ton.
Robin arrived with Max, her arm around him. She was twice his width. Max was studying Eddie, his finger still in my earring. Max let go, did his handshake all around. When he got to Eddie, they shook hands slowly. His hair was neatly slicked back into his ponytail again.
He was trying, but I wondered if he could ever be one of us. I had hoped I could introduce him to my father, but when I’d told Dad I was involved, he’d said, “What kind of individual calls himself Max?”
Max pulled out a vial and threw it to Eddie.
“Good man,” Eddie said, with only a touch of thanks, and immediately put it into the pocket of his cargo shorts.
I was a little taken aback by this because me and my friends really weren’t into coke—neither was Eddie, not much—and all Max did was drink a little red wine or beer.
Max put his hand on my back and pressed me close to him. “Educate your friends. Teach them a real buzz.”
And then, in front of everyone, Max took my face, held it with both hands, and kissed me on the mouth as if we were completely alone. I was into the show and would have taken this as far as he wanted to go until I tried to move away and felt his hands tighten around my face like a clamp. I put my hands deep in his front pockets and discreetly pressed my fingers into him, until he got the message to stop.
Max pulled me through the crowd. I looked over my shoulder and saw Eddie, Robin, her fiancé, and now Drew, watching.
The place was packed and I wondered if all these people would be at Robin’s wedding. A girl in gym shorts, a bikini top, and sun-burned chest, didn’t move out of Max’s way. She was so wasted she probably never saw me towering behind. He put his hands on her hips, she put her arms around his neck, her bottom lip practically dangling. They stood there, staring, until he gently moved her to the side.
We finally made it out to the deck where I could breathe. I concentrated on the sound of waves under the Water Music, Drew’s lighting flashing around us like a heartbeat on its way out. Guys with their collars turned up and Vuarnets on royal blue strings around their necks, leaned against the railing, holding cups of beer. I felt them looking, but I wasn’t sure if they were interested in me, or Max and me. I was almost a head taller and downright pale in comparison, not to mention the age thing. However, no one ever mistook him for my father.
“I see we’re big on the Country Day crowd here—getting bankrolled by mom and dad,” he said in the lowest of Max voices as he pressed the lever on the keg. He reminded me how he had caddied for these types as
a teenager to support himself. I guess that’s how he learned to dress—clean and pressed Polo shirts, deck shoes—because he wasn’t the preppy type. He talked to a couple of the guys, shifting his beer from one hand to the other in constant motion.
By that time the fireworks display had started, and everyone was coming out to the deck. I worried it would collapse. Robin headed toward me, the smell of rum rising in a vapor from her plastic cup.
Robin had a thing about Drew, like she was his mother. “I know he’s waiting for his chance with you. To have a real relationship. Why can’t you go for normal?”
I pointed out that Drew was doing pretty well for himself—under a strobe in the corner of the deck, practically sucking the face off a tan girl with a bleached pixie haircut.
“Look, Kath.” Robin was all tanked up, swinging her cup in sync with the rise and fall of her worries, the concoction flying out and dripping down her arm. “Max is like too closed up or something. And he’s always got one eye on you.”
“You don’t get it.”
“Don’t get what?”
“Things happen with Max.”
Eddie’s girlfriend came over, the only heels on the deck, and demanded to know who we were talking about.
“Max,” Robin said, downing her cup. “Mr. Obsession.”
“He’s packed.”
I saw Max coming toward us, with a shine on his forehead, managing four cups of beer. Several napkins were stuffed in his hip pocket, and I wondered where he had found them.
Robin and Eddie’s girlfriend couldn’t take their eyes off him. He was nothing like Eddie, or Drew or Robin’s fiancé. And, while he was charming them, he was doing it all for me, watching me with a vigilance that said, Whatever you want baby. But it wasn’t just that—and that was intoxicating in and of itself—it was the thing I could never put my finger on. Max was a mysterious mix. He never wanted you to do anything for him; he wanted to please you, wanted you to be yourself. So there you were, all happy and unaware, in the heart of his secret plan, until he slipped his two slim fingers inside you and helped himself to your soul.
This Side of Water Page 8
